Armchair Commentary

Amazon Pilots Inside Story: Creators Evan Endicott and Josh Stoddard on "Betas"

Friends with a dream of creating something amazing, something that the public can’t get enough of – this could describe the characters in Betas, a new comedy set in the world of Silicon Valley startups. It also could describe the guys who created the show, Evan Endicott and Josh Stoddard.

They met while working at Alexander Payne’s production company, and started writing together. Their first optioned work is Betas, one of 14 Amazon original pilots now playing for free at Amazon Instant Video and LOVEFiLM. Viewer response will help determine which of these children’s shows and comedies return with full seasons.

Amazon Studios Hollywonk blog contributor Sean Wicks asked Evan and Josh about their show, what they learned from working at Alexander Payne’s production company and how they tapped into the impact that social media has made on our culture as a whole:    

Where did you come up with the idea for Betas?

EVAN:  I worked with a producer named Michael London on the film Sideways and he called me out of the blue and asked if I would be interested in doing TV and this was right after Josh and I had just finished writing a pilot together.  We spoke with him about the idea for a ½ hour comedy about an Internet startup.  We both thought that was a fascinating place to spend some time mentally and we were shocked that nobody had done it yet.  Right away the idea of it being a social media startup was both obvious and important to us, especially to explore that aspect of our culture where so many young people are connected – more so than any time in history – yet how that creates its own isolation and set of problems.    It just seemed of the moment. 

You met while working at Alexander Payne’s production company. Did your background in the development world affect the way you approached writing the show?

EVAN:   Absolutely.  I’ve written a lot of notes and deconstructed a lot of scripts that it was extremely helpful.  We made fewer mistakes as a result of reading so much material and deconstructing it.

JOSH:  For me I have a tendency to be very precious with my writing and being partnered with Evan has been good in that regard as he’s able to get us to take two steps back and shuffle things around in new and interesting way than I am less willing to concede and try initially.

Tell us about the pilot.

JOSH:  It’s about 4 unlikely friends who are trying to launch a social media startup in Silicon Valley.    We watch them try to find new ways to improve and engineer other people’s social lives while they fail in their own lives and engage in relationships.

Our two leads are Trey and Nash, who are friends from Stanford.  Trey is the visionary of the group; he’s the one with the big ideas, the big picture, and the guy who could very well be the next [Mark] Zuckerberg.  Nash is the engineer of the group and not a social being at all.  He does not relate to people or emotional issues very well.  He is perfectly happy to have his headphones on and the world is an alien place to him. 

JOSH:  It is surprising how social media and that lens changes the way as to how we perceive people and the concept of friends and relationships in general. 

EVAN:  And identity, just how these people like to project themselves online because they have all these tools to project an image.  …  It’s a complex and fascinating issue.

JOSH:  That mentality that in a way these are the people that are engineering our social life and they are the least social and that irony was also very appealing. 

Tell me about the genesis of the title, Betas?

JOSH:  They are starting out in “beta” mode and trying to work out the kinks but then we have these young people in the show that are effectively in beta, they are still trying to figure out who they are.  Also it’s a male-driven show and these guys aren’t the alphas – they’re the betas.

This is your first option, and your first production.  Did you make any adjustments to the script once you had actors on set and saw them bringing your characters to life?

EVAN:  Once it was cast we started doing rewrites and started writing things specifically for actors and that’s just a different headspace to be as a writer just to know who is going to embody this and what their strengths are and what they might add to a line.  It’s kind of ruined writing for myself because it’s so much more interesting to write for other people.  I think all my characters sound the same in my head and it was a lot of fun to see other people bring them to life.

JOSH:  We got a fantastic cast from top to bottom.

EVAN:  I hope people like the show.  We’re proud of how it turned out and hope people want to see more of it.

Learn more about Amazon's pilots at the Amazon Studios blog, Hollywonk.

Amazon Pilots Inside Story: David Javerbaum ("The Daily Show") on "Browsers," Bebe Neuwirth, Music and More

When the characters in Browsers feel something, they don’t just say it. You don’t just see it. They sing it. They even dance it. And they do it with such wit – almost like an 11-time Emmy award-winning writer for The Daily Show is putting words in their mouth.

And one is: David Javerbaum. He’s actually got a dozen Emmys, having picked up one for the song “Broadway: It’s Not Just For Gays Anymore,” which so memorably opened the 65^th Tony Awards. And he’s also an author (The Last Testament: A Memoir By God; What to Expect When You’re Expected: A Fetus’ Guide to the First Three Trimesters).

Browsers, one of 14 Amazon original pilots now playing for free at Amazon Instant Video and LOVEFiLM,  is about four interns at Gush, a content-aggregating website (a la The Huffington Post or The Daily Beast) founded and run by the charismatic but mysterious Julianna Mancuso-Bruni (Bebe Neuwirth). “The show pokes fun at modern workplaces, the media, and more specifically Gush — starting with its penchant for deriving most of its content by cutting and pasting material from other websites,” Javerbaum said.

We asked Javerbaum about the setting of Browsers, the terrific cast, and the challenges of mixing comedy and music.

Why this world, why these characters?

I’ve long considered The Huffington Post the quintessential cultural artifact of our time in terms of what it covers, how it covers it, and why it remains popular. It literally provides a window into the state of the world, and so I thought setting a show there — and making the entirety of its universe fair game for our show — would provide an enormous amount of material.

As for the characters, as soon as I began formulating ideas for musical television shows, I knew I wanted the leads to be young people in their 20s, because that’s the age where you have the most energy, passion, uncertainty, and all that other good interesting quirky singable stuff. 

How does having music in the show adds to the experience/story?

The songs serve a different purpose here than they do in shows like Smash and Glee, not only because they are original, but because they are not “actually” happening. Rather, the songs are internal, taking place inside the character’s heads, meaning they are bound only by the laws of imagination and not by reality. 

Tell me about your awesome cast, and what they brought to the show.

Bebe Neuwirth (Julianna): The consummate professional. Hilarious on take one, still hilarious on take five.

Brigitte Davidovici (Kate): A beautiful person inside and out. Instantly winning from the moment you see her. Also an excellent baby-sitter.

Dustin Ingram (Josh): Gets more comedy out of one word than most people get out of a book. (Even the Bible, which is pretty funny.)

Constance Wu (Prudence): Beautiful. Intense scene presence. Funny and smart. Extremely fun to be around.

Marque Richardson (Gabe): Brings an inherent likability to a serious, sometimes humorless character. And man, can he tap dance. (For a later episode…)

Chris Wood (Justin): The interns’ supervisor. Half-man, half-douche, all-awesome.

Writing songs is hard enough – how much does it increase the degree of difficulty to also make them funny?

Actually, writing funny songs — at least songs I think are funny — is not that difficult once you come up with a single solid comedic premise for each one. The songs are for the most part much shorter than songs in either pop music or musical theater — two minutes tops, with the one-time exception of the opening song in the pilot episode — and, like a Monty Python sketch, we’re free to stop them at any time as soon as they no longer feel funny. But the good thing about writing songs in this format is that the burden of comedy is shared by not only the song and the performer, but by the visuals and the directing, and that is where a director of Don Scardino’s skill comes in and makes a song that was good on paper look amazing on screen.

How has the Amazon experience been so far?

I would not want Browsers to be anywhere else on TV — not network, basic cable or premium cable. The amount of freedom and trust I’ve been given, the commitment of money and resources, the directness of the communication with the powers-that-be and the quality of their notes, the possibilities entailed in a show about a website being aired on one — I couldn’t ask for anything more.

Check out the Amazon Studios Hollywonk blog for a song-by-song look at the Browsers soundtrack, available for free at Amazon MP3.

DVDs from the Vault: Forgotten Noir, Jungle Thrills - Plus! Rock, Doris, Popeye, Penrod and Sam (and More!)

Let's begin this week's feast of vintage features on DVD with a newly remastered quintet of lessr-known noir, all culled from the Warner acquisitions library and released via their manufacture on demand imprint, Warner Archives. Monogram's The Fall Guy (1947) benefits greatly from its source material - the short story "Cocaine," by Cornell Woolrich,, whose doom-laden work also served as the inspiration for The Leopard Man (1943), Phantom Lady (1944), Rear Window (1954), The Bride Wore Black (1968) and countless other films. The Fall Guy draws from one of Woolrich's favorite tropes - the crime commited in the wake of an alcohol- or drug-fueled blackout (see also Black Angel and The Guilty, both 1947) - with actor/director Leo Penn (father of Sean, Chris and Michael Penn, and here billed as Clifford Penn) discovering that he may have murdered a woman while in the grip of a bender. The left-field upbeat ending and budget-driven is balanced by the presence of Robert Armstrong (King Kong, 1933) as Penn's cop brother-in-law and Elisha Cook, Jr., in full ferret mode as a highly suspicious stranger. 

Kids' Pilots at Amazon: "We Want to Create Characters that Are Worthy to Have a Playdate With"

 

See how the kids' shows produced by Amazon (available at www.amazonoriginals.com) have been created with a commitment to educating children as well as entertaining them. And be sure to share your thoughts — viewer response will help determine which pilots return with additional episodes.

 

The Inside Story on Zombieland's TV Roots, What the Future Might Hold, and Post-Apocalyptic Upsides

What fans of Zombieland may not realize is that the 2009 hit movie, written by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, was originally imagined as a TV series.

“We wrote it in 2005 as a spec pilot and sold it to CBS and – this was pre-Walking Dead – and the idea was that zombies had been so successful on the big screen but they have never really been tapped on the small screen,” Paul said.  “The success of Zombieland in some ways paved the way for The Walking Dead to be on-air, and The Walking Dead is obviously a huge success. We’re so happy to be back on TV.”

Zombieland: The Series, is one of 14 Amazon original pilots now playing for free at Amazon Instant Video and LOVEFiLM. Viewer response will help determine which of these shows return with full seasons.

We asked with Paul and Rhett about zombies, their cast, and what the future might hold for their characters.

There are a lot of zombie stories out there, but you  but you guys have taken it in a direction that I think is more humorous than one might expect, post-apocalypse. 

Rhett:  Well I think what we wanted to do is to treat the post-apocalypse like an escapist fantasy.  There are a lot of post-apocalyptic stories like The Road and similar movies that treat the post apocalypse as a grim experience as it likely would be in real life, but we thought we wanted to turn it on its head a little bit and imagine the post-apocalyptic landscape as a fun one, and one where you could be free and do the kind of things that you wanted to do.  Maybe you were the last guy on Earth and maybe there was a cute girl who is also alive, and what would that mean?  So we wanted to look at the post-apocalyptic world as a playground full of toys and full of zombies to bash over the head and full of fun experiences and that was a jumping off point for us.

Paul:  It’s kind of like Los Angeles during the holiday season when everyone goes out of town, and traffic is a lot less and the air is cleaner and people are happier and we thought my God, that feels a little bit of what it would be like in the post-apocalypse, except you’re being chased by zombies.  So the wish fulfillment of that world is something that we really wanted to tap into that really sets us apart from all the other zombie projects, the idea that again you can drive Lamborghinis.  You can just go to the Lamborghini dealership and grab a yellow Lamborghini if you wanted to.  And you could get the hot girl because, you know, there aren’t a lot of choices out there.

What do you say to those who are nervous about seeing Zombieland as a series?

Paul:  Well I would say that they are in the best hands that they could be in.  The reason this was and is an original idea, it wasn’t based on a graphic novel it came out of our heads and it is now in our hands where it belongs and we have the utmost respect for the world and the franchise and the fans and we’ve captured the tone and feel of the movie.  We have cast wonderful actors who are playing characters – not replacements for other actors. 

Rhett: It bears mentioning that when we wrote Zombieland, we wrote the character of Tallahassee based upon an actor we knew, a friend of ours and an actor we had worked with named Kirk Ward, and he really inspired the character.  We wrote it for him intending for him to play it but when it became a movie, we needed a star and we went to Woody Harrelson, we found a phenomenal guy who left an indelible mark on that character and obviously brought it to life in a way that it will never be forgotten that will always set the bar of excellence.  That said, when it came time to turn it into a TV series again we desperately still wanted to work with Kirk Ward and to have him be our guy and it was a long circuitous casting process but we got our wish so people will be seeing in him our original vision for that character and I think that the other cast members are equally wonderful and are wonderful discoveries.  It’s true in theater that characters get passed on from one great actor to another and it’s almost like a legacy and we hope that it will be the case in this case.  There are also a lot of good examples of movies becoming Television shows, something like The Odd Couple – you know Jack Lemmon, Tony Randall, two wonderful actors playing the same part.  There’s Billy Bob Thornton and Kyle Chandler on Friday Night Lights.  I think there is certainly precedent for what we are doing and we hope to catch lightning in a bottle again. 

Rhett:  We really believe that we are holding the standard of the movie and it will be up to America and the world to decide. It’s not for us to decide, but we have confidence in it. 

Great zombie stories – like yours – have a unique way of helping people understand humanity. Is that kind of thing in your mind at all?

Rhett:  A little bit.  To some extent we don’t want to take ourselves too seriously.  I do think that zombies are a stand-in for all of our collective fears; you know each of us fears different things in life.  Zombies are a nice way within the world of fiction to embody those fears into something then bash it over the head with a baseball bat.  I think there’s something to that; it’s a kind of cathartic kind of movie or TV show.

If the series goes forward, how do you envision it unfolding over time?

Paul:  Inherent in the movie and in the pilot is this idea that they are on the road, it’s a traveling circus and we would like to embrace that.  As we are heading out of California and heading east, these adventures will take place in Vegas and Graceland and Mount Rushmore.  We want it to take advantage of the landscape and America and all the fun that awaits them on the road.  That would be what I say most.  They’re all looking for their own sense of home and peace and I think that Tallahassee is looking for love and hopefully will find it and Columbus will hopefully find it in Wichita.

Rhett:  And a show like Battlestar Galactica a real endgame, that being let’s get back to Earth, let’s get back home.  As they had that, and I think we also have the idea let’s ultimately try to find a place of safety, a home and a community for the future.  That won’t be reached right away because then there wouldn’t be a show, but I think in the long run we’ll try to take our guys to that mythical place of safety and renewal.

- Stephanie Reid-Simons

 

"Those Who Can't" Creators and Stars on TV, Comedy, and Making a Pilot for Amazon

Adam Cayton-Holland, Andrew Orvedahl, and Ben Roy, the co-writers and stars behind Amazon’s new original pilot, Those Who Can’t, recently sat down with one another in Adam’s living room in Denver, Colorado to talk about their show, which is now available for free on Amazon Instant Video. It went a little something like this:

Adam: So I’ll start with the first question: Who are you guys and what are you doing in my house?

Andrew: Adam, it’s us. Your early-onset dementia is getting the better of you again.

Ben: Alright, are you guys excited about the premiere of Those Who Can’t?

ADAM SCREAMS UNINTELLIGIBLY.

Andrew: I’m very excited. … I don’t know what the average daily visitor count to Amazon’s website is but I’d imagine it’s quite a few. To think of that many people being able to watch our show for free is kind of intimidating.

Andrew: What other sitcoms inspired you guys in writing this?

Adam: I was watching It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia a fair amount during this. I was watching The League a little bit too. I was also watching The Larry Sanders Show a lot. That’s a great show.

Ben: I watch a lot of older sitcoms. Now that my son is old enough I’ve been re-watching some of my old favorites with him — The Wonder Years, Freaks and Geeks, a few others…

Ben: We definitely were influenced by Strangers With Candy. We all mentioned that one when we started brainstorming the show.

Andrew: Probably one of my favorite shows ever. We all like high school shows and high school settings so it was really fun to make one of our own.

Adam: Andrew, what was your favorite part of filming?

Andrew: Anything other than getting hit in the face with a kickball over and over again. Not that for sure.

Ben: That was my favorite part.

Andrew: The most fun part was watching other people’s scenes, because then you could just sit back and it was kind of fun to watch. I don’t know, pretty much every scene I was in with Rory was pretty fun and really hard not to laugh. I broke like forty times.

Adam: Rory Scovel is hilarious in this episode. He plays the principal of Buchanan High School, where the show is set and where we’re all teachers.

DVDs from the Vault: Vintage Hollywood! Classic TV! Multi-Disc Mania! Westerns Aplenty! And More!

Independent distributors Olive Films continue to underscore their status as a dream label for cinephiles and collectors with its current batch of titles, all culled from the vaults of Republic Pictures and available in both DVD and Blu-ray formats. Chief among the current lineup is Mark Robson's Champion (1949), a scabrous, violent profile of a ruthless boxer (Kirk Douglas, who received an Oscar nod for his performance) whose desperate drive to rise above his bottom-floor social standing results in the ruination of his closest relationships (brother Arthur Kennedy, manager Paul Stewart and desire object Marilyn Maxwell) and ultimately, his own self-respect. The darker corners of the soul are also the focus of The Enforcer (1951), with Humphrey Bogart (in his final role for Warner Bros., which distributed the film for United States Pictures) as an assistant district attorney trying to bring down mobster Everett Sloane, who runs a Murder, Inc. style ring of contract killers, and Fred Zinneman's The Men (1950), with Marlon Brando as a former GI struggling with a wartime injury that has left him a paraplegic and Sloane, Jack Webb and Teresa Wright as the doctor, fellow patient and fiancee who aid in his recovery. Both The Men and Champion were early producer credits for director Stanley Kramer and penned by Carl Foreman (High Noon), who received Oscar nominations for both efforts.

An Inside Look at The Onion's "News Empire"

Truth. Ethics. Teamwork. It’s obvious which of these things drives the Onion News Network team — none of them. (Unless by "truth" you mean "truly amazing ratings.")

Will Graham and Dan Mirk tell the story of these fine journalists in Onion News Empire, one of 14 Amazon original pilots now playing for free at Amazon Instant Video. Viewer response will help determine which of these shows return with full seasons.

We asked Will and Dan about their show, their terrific cast (including Jeffrey Tambor, Cheyenne Jackson, and Chris Masterson), and what the future might hold for their characters.

How do you describe your show?

"Onion News Empire" is about ambitious reporters and anchors working for the world's most terrifying cable news channel. It's a comedy that thinks it's a very self-important drama — so it looks and feels like a combination of an Aaron Sorkin show and a Shonda Rimes show, but it's wall to wall ridiculous jokes. 

Why this world, why these characters?

We started The Onion News Network web video series in 2007 and almost from the beginning we'd been talking about how fun it would be to do a narrative show set behind the scenes at the network. As for the characters, we basically wanted to see the network from its lowliest employees (like our new reporter Sam West who is fresh from a two-bit local news station) to the very top of the corporation (like our evil CEO Helena who is personal friends with dictators and keeps a flesh-eating falcon in her office).

Tell me about your awesome cast, and what they brought to the show.

The cast is extremely talented and physically attractive. Jeffery Tambor takes every line and makes it so much funnier, more compelling, and weirder than you'd ever expect. Cheyenne Jackson looks and acts like he's from a superior species that will gradually replace humans because they're just better than we are  — he's so handsome, so kind, and so funny. Chris Masterson was a real prince  — he came onto the pilot about 48 hours before we shot and knocked it out of the park. He took a role that could have been a little boring and made it really funny and compelling. Aja Naomi King is just such a committed and talented actress  — a show like this get so ridiculous, that it needs someone incredible like Aja who can make even a silly joke about riding roller coasters by yourself somehow simultaneously hilarious and very sad. Bill Sadler is like a God to both of us, because we loved him in Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey. And Laila Robins — there's not much to say except that she's perfect in every way. She brought a scariness to the comedy that elevated the whole show.

What is the appeal of fake news?

We wouldn't know anything about that. The Onion News Network is real news. 

Writing hilarious headline jokes is hard enough – how much does it increase the degree of difficulty to create it as a part of a show?

Writing the headline jokes is always hard  — for every single headline that gets into the show, we have written pages and pages of others that all get thrown away, which is how The Onion has worked from the beginning. So that process is staying the same, but now we are also adding in the challenge of working those headlines into what we hope is a compelling narrative with characters people want to watch. So basically it is one hard thing plus another hard thing, which equals a harder thing. But at the end of the day you are still writing jokes which is a very fun job. We have nothing to complain about.

What inspires you?

The real news and regular dumb life are always our biggest inspirations. 

What does the future hold for your characters?

A lot of intrigue, back-stabbing, passion, and tragedy. The show is really an intensely serious drama that just happens to be filled with dumb jokes, so expect a lot of dramatic twists. Characters might get killed off, allegiances will change, a guy might go to space.

DVDs from the Vault: Bowery Boys Volume 2, Jackie Chan, Repo Man, Eddie Cantor and More!

Warner Archives has issued The Bowery Boys: Volume 2, a four-disc collection featuring twelve titles from the impossibly long-running comedy series. The dozen pictures collected in the set roughly cover the first decade of the team's stint under the Bowery Boys' moniker after two previous decades as the Dead End Kids, Little Tough Guys and East Side Kids. The tone of the Bowery movies is decidedly more slapstick than in previous incarnations (thanks in part to the behind-the-camera presence of Three Stooges vet Edward Bernds and Jean Yarbrough, who directed numerous Abbott and Costello features and TV shows), and as the series progressed, swiftly moved into psychotronic territory: in Spook Busters (1946), a mad scientist wants to put the brain of Sach (Huntz Hall) into a gorilla, while a spate of candy consumption in Master Minds (1949) gives Sach psychic abilities, which attracts the attention of another mad scientist (Alan Napier from the TV Batman) with noggin-swapping designs for his monster (Glenn Strange). Bernds' The Bowery Boys Meet the Monsters (1955) goes all-out in its grab for the horror-kid crowd, offering up mad scientist John Dehner a gorilla, robot, vampire and a man-eating tree (maintained by The Waltons' Ellen Corby). The other Boys' adventures included in the set are only moderately less weird - they develop a vitamin drink that makes Hall an unstoppable football champ in Hold That Line (1952), tangle with outlaws in Bowery Buckaroos (1947), faux spiritualists (Hard Boiled Mahoney, 1947) and con artist Amanda Blake in High Society (1955), which was accidentally offered up by the Academy for a Best Story Oscar. The Bowery Boys' titles are definitely an acquired taste, but for former Saturday afternoon matinee habitues of a certain age, their antics are comfort-food-level pleasures, dependably broad and daffy and entirely predictable; the WA set features pressed discs and widescreen presentations on Meet the Monsters and two other titles.

DVDs from the Vault, Short and Sweet Edition: Gable, Stewart, Ford, Bakshi, Hanna-Barbera and More

There's a great deal of ground to cover this week, so let's dive right in, shall we? Sony Pictures Choice Collection's new edition of Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder (1959) is, to date, the fifth presentation of this Oscar-nominated legal drama on DVD and Blu-ray, but it's also reportedly the first to be offered in its correct aspect ration (1.85 widescreen standard). That may or may not affect your appreciation for this stellar picture,with James Stewart and George C. Scott as lawyers facing off over an Army officer (Ben Gazzara) accused of murdering a bartender who assaulted his seductive wife (Lee Remick) and its groundbreaking jazz score by Duke Ellington.

Meanwhile, Warner Archives offers three titles starring Clark Gable that span his tenure as a leading man at MGM. Gable co-stars with Marion Davies in the light 1932 comedy-drama Polly of the Circus as a small town reverend who falls in love with Davies' circus aerialist, much to the consternation of his flock. He's then reteamed with his Call of the Wild (1935) co-star Loretta Young for the fizzy romantic comedy Key to the City (1950), which pits rough-and-tumble Gable against Young's well-heeled Maine mayor, with the expected fireworks. The Gable three-fer concludes with Never Let Me Go (1953), a sudsy Delmar Daves effort with Gene Tierney as the Russian ballerina and Gable as the American news reporter determined to get her out of the hands of the Soviets. No real classics here, but all three pics underscore Gable's magnetic screen presence and enduring popularity.

Also on the vintage Hollywood front: John Ford's Rising of the Moon (1957; Warner Archives), an anthology of Irish stories introduced by Tyrone Power and featuring a stellar cast of Emerald Isle players, including Cyril Cusack, Jack MacGowran, Donal Donnelly and Dennis O'Day. The trio of stories, culled fromg the fiction of Frank O'Connor and a controversial one-act play from 1907, hew towards the precious at times (and apparently earned the enmity of the Northern Irish, who banned the film over alleged revolutionary overtones), but Ford aficionados will appreciate this opportunity to see one of the director's more obscure and personal projects. The Hireling (Sony) has also been out of circulation for many years, despite having shared the Grand Prize at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival with Scarecrow. The class drama stars Sarah Miles as a bereaved aristocrat who forms a relationship with her chauffeur (Robert Shaw); the stars are better than the material, which takes a curious and heavy-handed offramp into anarchy for its conclusion.

For those seeking lighter fare, Warner has a trio of offbeat comedies, some more successful than others, but all with something to recommend a viewing. The political comedy First Family (1980) carries an exceptional pedigree, with script and direction by Buck Henry and a cast featuring (among others) Bob Newhart as the President of the United States, Madeleine Kahn as his wife, Gilda Radner as their hapless daughter, and a staff populated by Rip Torn, Fred Willard, Bob Dishy, Harvey Korman and Austin Pendleton. Despite this lineup, the movie is almost universally loathed, most likely for its broad slapstick tone, which wastes its cast, and a subplot involving slavery (!). Also on the nice-try front: Whiffs (1975), with Elliott Gould as a former guinea pig for Army chemical engineers who uses his first-hand knowledge of harmful gases to launch a series of bank robberies. Gould's presence was a clear indication that the filmmakers were aiming for a M*A*S*H-styled military farce, but what's delivered is a truly oddball mix of slapstick and counterculture gags. Again, it's the supporting cast that encourages a commitment to sit through the whole picture: aiding and abetting Gould is Harry Guardino, Eddie Albert, Godfrey Cambridge (as Gould's co-conspirator), Howard Hesseman, Richard Masur and Jennifer O'Neill. Eagle-eyed movie trainspotters will also note the presence of B-Western stars Don "Red" Barry and James Brown (not the Godfather of Soul). Nice one-sheet art by the prolific illustrator Robert Grossman, too.

There are a lot of interesting ideas floating around in Ralph Bakshi's Hey Good Lookin' (1982; Warner Archives), which looks at the Brooklyn of his youth and a pair of neighborhood ne'er-do-wells (voiced by Richard Romanus and David Proval) based on his childhood friends. Begun in 1975 as a mix of live action and animation that also featured the New York Dolls and Yaphet Kotto, it was held from release in the wake of the uproar following Bakshi's Coonskin and revised in 1982 as an all-animated feature at the insistence of Warner Bros. president Frank Wells. The end result is a mishmash of Bakshi's pointed satire and adult themes, as well as some striking visual elements, but probably best appreciated by the animator's diehard fans. 

One wonders what Ralph Bakshi might have made of Help!... it's the Hair Bear Bunch (Warner), a short-lived Saturday morning animated series from Hanna-Barbera circa 1971 about a trio of ursine semi-hippies and their constant attempts to escape the Wonderland Zoo and its uptight director Mr. Peevly (voiced by John Stephenson). As it stands, the series, which features voice work by cartoon vets Daws Butler, Paul Winchell, Don Messick and Joe E. Ross, doing his ooh-ooh bit as Peevly's assistant, has the not-unpleasant patina of weird that clings to most Nixon-era H-B efforts (see also The Funky Phantom, the recently released Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kids and CB Bears) that also manages to be curiously comforting, especially for those who remember wolfing down their Quake and Quisp in front of such shows. Can Where's Huddles? be far behind?